Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy — The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies. — When Microsoft and Apple were founded. — As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup.

Start a company in a recession? Absolutely! — Now is a great time to start a company. Why? Because great people are available to join you, VCs are loaded with cash, and office space is available cheap. Everything is cheap and readily available in a recession.

Keeping Count: The TechCrunch Layoff Tracker — After Silicon Valley woke up to the economic crisis last week and VCs rang the alarm bells, startups are starting to heed the call and tighten their belts for a long winter. As the slide above from Sequoia Capital illustrates …

Difficult Times, Difficult Decisions — This week we are reducing our workforce by 25%. This was an incredibly painful decision for me and the leadership team, but, in the end, we concluded that we had no choice but to securely batten down the hatches as we sail into a major economic storm.

FRIENDS OF THE BAND — ZUCKERBERG PONDERS FACEBOOK MUSIC BIZ — Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg is plotting a possible push into the digital-music business in the wake of MySpace's launch of MySpace Music last month. — The surging social-networking giant is talking to a number …

Google adds gambling to revenue search — Google is allowing gambling advertisements in its search results in Britain - for the first time anywhere in the world since a self-imposed moratorium in 2004. — Industry experts say the search engine, which welcomed the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh …

Due next from Apple: refreshed 20- and 24-inch iMacs — Assuming last minute snags are avoided, the coming weeks should bring new iMacs, rounding out Apple's 2008 hardware introductions as the company enters the holiday shopping season with one of its strongest product portfolios ever.

Fennec - M9 (User Experience Alpha) — Fennec (Mobile Firefox) has reached milestone 9, which is also our first alpha! We're calling this release the User Experience alpha. The last eight milestones were building up to getting a stable browser with an easy to use interface.

Man killed wife in Facebook row — A man has been jailed for life for stabbing his wife to death over a posting she made on the social networking site Facebook. — Wayne Forrester, 34, told police he was devastated that his wife Emma, also 34, had changed her online profile to “single” days after he had moved out.

Gmail Back After 30 Hours Down — A Gmail outage that lasted about 30 hours and affected some Google Apps customers was finally fixed late on Thursday. — At around 9:30 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time, a Google spokesman said via e-mail that the problem had been solved.

Translation From Weasel-Speak to English of the Entirety of Duncan Riley's Second Post-MacBook-Introduction-Event Update to His Widely-Cited Week-Ago Report That Apple Was Going to Announce an ‘$800 Laptop’ — With regard to “Update 2” here. … The entire report was completely wrong.

Video Network Heavy Fires 14% Of Staff* — The snap consensus among tech and Web outfits who are sloughing off staff this fall: something in the 15%- to 30% range seems to be the way to go. Today's entry: Dude-centric publisher and ad network Heavy, which is laying off 12 people, which it says amounts to 14% of its staff.

Search engine startup SearchMe cuts 20 percent of staff — The streets of Silicon Valley are running red this week. The latest startup to pare down is search engine SearchMe, a company with high-profile investors and a warchest of nearly $40 million. — It reduced its staff by two-thirds …

DisplayPort: What you need to know — With laptop updates, Apple supports emerging display standard — Apple didn't just introduce new laptops Tuesday; it also introduced a new term to the vocabulary of Mac users—DisplayPort. The Mini DisplayPort found on new MacBooks …